Junius Scales, 82; Communist Party Spokesman Jailed, Then Freed in ’62

Junius Scales, the only American Communist Party member to serve prison time after being convicted of violating a 1940 law that made it illegal to belong to any organization that advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, has died. He was 82.

Scales, whose sentence was commuted by President Kennedy in 1962, died of heart failure and the effects of a stroke Monday in a New York City hospital.

Scales, who joined the Communist Party in 1939 while a student at the University of North Carolina, later became a prominent party spokesman and a target of the FBI as he organized workers in the South for the Communist Party.

Arrested by the FBI in 1954, he was convicted under the membership clause of the Smith Act after two trials in federal court and a lengthy appeals process that twice reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

Scales, who publicly left the Communist Party in 1957, was sentenced in 1961 to six years in federal prison.

The U.S. Supreme Court later declared the law unconstitutional.

The Scales case became a cause celebre. His imprisonment spurred a flurry of letters to President Kennedy demanding clemency. Among the prominent Americans who came to Scales’ defense were the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt; writers Norman Mailer, James Baldwin and Saul Bellow; and labor leaders Walter Reuther and George Meany. An editorial in the New York Times, calling Scales a “misguided idealist,” stated, “There is something un-American in having even one political prisoner in the United States.”

On Christmas Eve 1962, over the objections of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, Kennedy commuted Scales’ sentence to 15 months served.

Scales was born in Greensboro, N.C., on March 26, 1920, into a socially and politically prominent family. His father was a lawyer and developer, whose side of the family included the first chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court and a governor of the state.

The bookish Scales grew up in a 36-room mansion, and the only blacks he knew were the family’s servants. His arrival at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill was a life-altering experience.

He was astonished, he wrote in his 1987 memoir “Cause At Heart: A Former Communist Remembers,” to discover “immeasurable suffering, exploitation and poverty had existed among thousands of people right under my nose all my life, and I’d been totally unaware of it.”

At the university, he joined the Karl Marx Study Club and became its head, arranging for campus speakers such as John Gages, editor of The Daily Worker, the American Communist Party newspaper.

He became a communist, Scales said in an interview with Contemporary Authors, because “The Communist Party opposed fascism, organized workers, projected a Socialist future and, alone, stood for the full economic, political and social equality of blacks.”

Scales’ absorption into social and political questions of the day led him to leave college and become a union organizer. He also began rising in the ranks of the party’s North Carolina state committee, but his political activity was curtailed when he joined the Army after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

After the war, Scales returned to Chapel Hill and resumed his Communist Party activities. He also generated headlines when he was elected vice president of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, becoming the first white officer of the mostly middle-class, Communist-led group, which was seeking racial equality.

When the Communist Party came under attack from the Justice Department for violation of the Smith Act, Scales was forced by the party to go underground. He was arrested three years later, on Nov. 18, 1954, in Memphis.

In 1957, months before his second trial, Scales left the Communist Party.

In his interview with Contemporary Authors, he said he was “still proud of its pioneering struggle for civil rights, its opposition to war and McCarthyism, and its support of the workers. However, I was profoundly disgusted with its subservience to the Soviet Union, its sectarianism, its grandiosity, its ambivalence on democratic issues.

“The revelations of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev about his predecessor Josef Stalin and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution completed my disillusionment.”

American Communists, Scales once told the Associated Press, “were duped. We’d been unwitting apologists for one of the worst regimes of the century.”

After his release from prison in 1962, Scales said he had a wife and daughter to support and was no longer interested in activism.

“We didn’t have anything when I got out of prison,” he later told the Associated Press.

“My family had suffered enough from my doings, so I decided to head to a high-paying job.”

Scales landed a job as an overnight proofreader at the New York Times. His wife, Gladys, who had spearheaded the writing campaign to free him from prison, became a teacher. She died in 1981.

After retiring from the newspaper in 1983, Scales lived a quiet life in a hilltop cottage in Pine Bush, N.Y. He is survived by his daughter Barbara of Montreal and one grandchild.